The essential etiquette guide to modern life

Delinquent behaviour

Teenage behaviour is publicly acceptable in anyone apart from teenagers. This is the principle that undid Paris Brown, the 17-year-old police youth crime commissioner who resigned last week over offensive messages sent on Twitter. Her mistake was to be found out before reaching an age where she might plausibly be thought old enough to know better. This is called Keith Richards’s First Law of Delinquency: Indulgence of youth increases in inverse proportion to the youth of the indulged.

Grown-ups are expected to have some lurid tales of youthful disgrace to deploy in polite company. This is because no one wants to admit to having a frigidly pious adolescence.

It is better to have flirted with riot and survived than to have avoided it altogether. Hence, there are more respectable ex-punks today than there were ever actual punks (a mathematical impossibility known as Lydon’s Paradox).

The admissible adult limit of youthful misdemeanour is mild recreational drug use with bouts of drunken disorder up to and including minor acts of criminal damage. These must have occurred long enough ago to now seem victimless. This threshold is called the Bullingdon Point. Given sufficient time, acts that would be condemned in today’s youth can be filed away with an indulgent smile alongside embarrassing old record purchases. The unit for measuring cringes induced by humiliating memories of past disgrace is the Agadoo.

The honours system

The decision by Sir James Crosby, former chief executive of HBOS, to return his knighthood in penance for leading the bank to catastrophic failure may look like sensible contrition. But it is a breach of fundamental laws of British society and a terrible faux pas. Crosby’s error is to have implied a whole set of causal relations between wealth, ability and social status that don’t exist.

By surrendering his honour, Crosby seems to suggest that it was given to him for some genuine achievement and that the unravelling of that achievement is grounds for its return. This is nonsense. The award was bestowed, like most British honours, for the fact of his being tremendously rich, regardless of skill or morality. Since Crosby is still wealthy – and there is no evidence he has acquired new competence since wrecking HBOS – he is perfectly entitled to keep his gong.

Two founding principles of the British establishment: first, that money can buy status on the condition that a pretence is maintained that it doesn’t; second, that no height of idiocy is unforgivable in the rich. By accepting some kind of punishment for his role in the credit crunch, Crosby is complicit in the notion that merit should be involved in the hierarchy of public life. This is a deeply subversive act, which is why he will get not credit for it. His allocated role is to be arrogantly and brazenly unrepentant and he should not deviate from that position.

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